Computer data is vital to today's organizations, and content addressable storage systems (such as DELL EMC XTREMIO) (hereinafter “XtremIO”) can support a rich set of advanced data services such as single data instance, compression, snapshots, etc., by decoupling storage access, logical volume address space, and physical on-disk location of data. In systems such as this, volume and physical layout metadata can offer tremendous flexibility in decoupling and virtualization.
In network environments where high-availability is a necessity, system administrators are constantly faced with the challenges of preserving data integrity and ensuring availability of critical system components, such as data systems and file systems. A significant part of protection of computer data against disasters is focused on data protection and on providing ways for computer systems to recover from disasters and other disruptions. Storage systems sometimes experience failures. For example, a storage device, such as a disk drive, may malfunction making the data stored therein inaccessible (at least temporarily). In addition, data stored on a storage system may become corrupted. To protect against data loss as result of data corruption, file system corruption, and/or hardware failure, storage systems frequently use one or more protection strategies, such mirroring and use of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).
Mirroring can include maintaining a copy of data stored on a storage device on one or more other storage devices. RAID can include striping data across a plurality of storage devices, and an additional storage device stores parity information for the data. Thus, if one of the storage devices fails, the parity information may be used to recover the portion of the data stored on the failed storage device. Likewise, if a portion of the data becomes corrupted, the parity information may be used to correct the data. Other RAID strategies involve rotating the parity information across all storage devices or striping the data across multiple storage devices without storing any parity information.